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Three years ago, in a documentary that was equal parts witty and disturbing, Morgan Spurlock took viewers along on his month-long McDonald's binge. For 30 days, every food or beverage that entered his mouth came from the fast-food franchise. And every time a clerk asked if he wanted to super-size—bump up the size of the fries and drink in his order—he did. This gave rise to the feature's...

Several years ago, Carlos Herrera Macias, 55, learned that he had type 2 diabetes. He already knew about that obesity-related disease—his mother had had it too. But his doctors soon delivered a second diagnosis that was unfamiliar to Macias. "They told me that something was wrong with my liver," he recalls.

Catharina Svanborg thought that she already knew how remarkable breast milk is. The immunologist had logged hundreds of lab hours documenting ways in which human milk helps babies fight infections. But when the group decided to use cancerous lung cells to avoid the variability shown by normal cells in laboratory tests, Svanborg and her team at Lund University in Sweden were in for a surprise...

Despite torrents of high-energy radiation, physicists have captured images of explosions that lead to some of the world's most powerful bursts of X rays. The snapshots reveal previously unseen details of fiery disintegrations at the core of a giant, energy-focusing machine called Z. Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., use the device to simulate nuclear-weapons...

Last summer, when more than 8 million trillion calcium ions blasted a thin film of americium atoms nonstop for more than a month, the collisions generated four atoms of never-before-seen element 115, a Russian-U.S. team now reports.

Making heavy, artificial atomic nuclei has long been part of the program for answering fundamental questions about matter and the universe, but it hasn't been easy. Physicists are looking toward techniques that forge hefty nuclei by fusing lighter, radioactive ones. Now, results of an accelerator experiment at Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory suggest that the approach may prove even more...